Theology and Church:

...In these essays, as in his masterful book, The God of Jesus Christ, Kasper pays Rahner the fine homage of respectful critique...

...Kasper will typically begin his exposition by underscoring the dignity and grandeur of the human formed to God's image...

...At the same time, theology articulates the critical and constructive moment of the community's life, as it seeks to give an account of its hope not only to itself, but also to the cultural and social context in which it is immersed and to which it must serve as sacrament of salvation...

...but, if lived out faithfully and patiently within the communion of the whole church, it can be the life-promoting tension that propels the pilgrim people forward on its journey of faith...

...In the spirit of the Tubingen School, Kasper presents an understanding of the theologian's vocation that is fully ecclesial, but not narrowly ecclesiastical...

...Kasper is inspired by the Tubingen tradition in elaborating a theological vision and program that is ample and unthreatened by modern developments in philosophy and the sciences...

...He has several times referred to his own theological enterprise with the seemingly redundant phrase: a "theological theology...

...In the important essay on "The Continuing Challenge of Vatican II," he minces no words...

...It is this "Wisdom" orientation that is so characteristic of the theology of Rahner, endowing it with such energizing scope...

...To quote, with Kasper, the patristic author with whom he has special affinity, Irenaeus of Lyons: "Christ has brought everything new by bringing himself, as he was promised...

...Kasper takes his cue from Paul in Romans 5 to celebrate the Christological "much more...

...A perspicuous example of the generous catholicity that marks these essays is the treatment Kasper accords the late Karl Rahner...

...Thus the two Christological essays-"Christology and Anthropology" and "One of the Trinity...

...The book's introduction, "Systematic Theology Today and the Tasks Before It," is timely...

...Hence Kasper can assert: "In this living interpretation of tradition, theology has an important, relatively independent function within the church...

...It was, after all, "for us and our salvation" that the Word was made flesh...

...Not only has the image been restored, it has been brought to surpassing fullness...

...Human freedom and autonomy provide the very condition for a responsible hearing and doing of the Word...

...He insists that, beginning with the self-transcending subject, theology must move to the affirmation of the transcendent God...

...Robert P. Imbelli Walter Kasper, the new Catholic bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, was for many years professor of systematic theology in the University of Tubingen...

...the essays on church flow from them...

...It is undertaken within the community of faith and strives to serve the life of that community, "the living process of tradition and communication, in which the one gospel of Jesus Christ is interpreted and actualized...

...Hence, the theology of the cross must remain central to any reconsideration of Christology...

...In his most recent collection of essays, titled Theology and Church, Kasper shows himself a passionate partisan of Vatican II...

...For this is what was proclaimed: that the new should come in order to renew men and women and make them live...

...In these crucial times for Catholic theology one needs all the illumination and guidance one can obtain...

...However, as responsible mediator between the Christian faith and its cultural context, the theologian must be more than a catechist or a mere ancillary of the church's magisterium...

...There is, in Kasper's view, a "Christological determination" both of human nature and of ecclesial reality...

...Kasper's theology, with its sensitivity to the action of the Holy Spirit in the church and in the world, has always emphasized the transformative thrust of Christian existence...

...The earlier anthropological essays lead up to them...

...provide the volume's center of gravity...

...He or she is also bound by the critical canons of theological research and, most especially, by the unique requirements of the transcendent subject of its reflection: the God of Jesus Christ...

...One must be grateful to the publisher for making these fine essays available to an English-speaking audience, in a generally reliable and fluent translation...

...The church can therefore only move into the future on the basis of the last council's resolutions, and by implementing them conscientiously...

...As member of the community, the theologian is bound to the life and worship of the community and to its hierarchical leadership...

...Rooted in the great tradition of the church Catholic, he can welcome and embrace every hard-won intimation of truth, whatever its source...

...He honors Rahner as the theologian who, above all, fostered Catholic theology's confrontation with modernity...

...The gospel is both promise and judgment...

...Tension will not be lacking...

...Theoretically, Rahner's accomplishment signaled a much-delayed coming to terms with the Enlightenment's focus upon the human subject as a critical starting point for the reflective task...

...The grace of the new Adam far exceeds the transgression of the old...

...The result is not a simplistic and reductionistic understanding of the theological task, but a complex and nuanced one...

...Theology is no neutral discipline...

...However, the freedom in question is no simple return to autonomy...

...Not surprisingly, the logic of this "correlation and analogy" perspective is a "Christo-logic...

...Not only grace, however, but also sin is ingredient to the human condition...

...He thus represents the continuing influence of the Tubingen School of Catholic Theology, whose great nineteenth-century standard-bearers offered an alternative to that century's dominant neoscholas-ticism with its lack of historical sense and its almost total divorce from the intellectual life of its time...

...but he exegetes it in the more contemporary idiom of freedom...

...It is the revelation of that new and definitive freedom bestowed by the Spirit, whose horizon is unlimited Love and whose end is human transformation in Christ...

...In Kasper's distinctive synthesis, both the Catholic Karl Rahner and the Protestant Karl Barth receive grateful due and compliment one another...

...Kasper does not hesitate to employ the classic patristic language of "divinization...

...and that this "movement" originates in the church's worship and culminates in the worshipful praise of the Triune God in whom we live and move and have our being...

...Thus in the essay "Autonomy and Theonomy," he speaks of the need to move beyond both a "restoration" model that is closed in principle to the aspirations of modernity and a "progressive" model that uncritically canonizes them...

...Yet, for all his genuine appreciation of Rahner, Kasper is not simply a Rahnerian...

...Pastorally, it concentrated once again upon the salvific import of theology's symbols and statements, liberating them from a desiccated dogmatism...

...Here Barth's insistence receives careful attention...

...There is, assuredly, an original blessing enshrined in creation, which ever proceeds from God through the Word and in the Spirit...

...or, in other places, a "doxological theology...

...Kasper's writings are such an illuminating guide...

...My sole regret is the omission, from the present volume, of several important essays on Catholic theological hermeneutics which comprised "Part One" of the German original...

...He opts, instead, for a "correlation and analogy" model that affirms the aspirations, negates their idolatrous overlay, and proclaims the transforming gospel of grace...

...In the present work this sensitivity is further refined through the adoption of the classic tripartite schema of affirmation, negation, and analogical recapitulation...

...revelation of the truth and unmasking of the lie...

...In the essay "Christology and Anthropology," Kasper endorses Rahner's "turn to the subject" in Catholic theology and his retrieval of the anthropological dimension of theological reflection: an imperative from both a theoretical and pastoral standpoint...

...Any attempt to "restore" things to a preconciliar state "would plunge the church into a foun-dational crisis compared with which the present state of affairs is a trifle...